In our last post of the term, we're bringing you the answers to this year's epic (some would say marathon) World Book Day quiz, before announcing the winner. Did you get any of them right? Will it be you?? Read on and find out ...
Round 1 - Can you judge a book by its cover? - was set by Mr Harris. For Cover No. 1, suggestions included Moby Dick, Jaws, The Kraken, Eragon and Swallows and Amazons (does that look like the Lake District to you???), but the answer, as most of you knew was ....
... that this was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. But only 8 of you recognised it.
Cover No. 3, stark and simple, reminded some of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A couple of you leapt on the solitary letter above the picture and suggested V for Vendetta. But the letter isn't the first in the title: it's the first in the author's name. So the correct answer was Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse. The lighthouse is a clue.
The 'woolf' theme continued with Cover No. 4, which produced many animal-based suggestions, some of them more plausible than others. But it wasn't The Call of the Wild, The Jungle Book, The Just So Stories, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Fantastic Mr Fox, Beo-wolf (we see what you did there) or Jaws ...
The final cover was definitely the most difficult, but it triggered some ingenious answers. Many of you thought you'd spotted the remote Overlook Hotel in Stephen King's The Shining or The Grand Budapest Hotel (surely not purple enough?) or Kafka's The Castle. Others drew their inspiration from the landscape, opting for The Waste Land, Touching the Void, The Tartar and the Steppe, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Into Thin Air. But, alas, it was none of these: it was The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and only six of you identified it correctly. Ah well.
Next came Mr Green's round of testing sci-fi questions. You thought that the man-made structure that appears in novels by Jeff VanderMeer and Virginia Woolf might be the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, the Great Wall of China, The Tower of London, a boat, a bridge or a pyramid. But if you got question 2 in Round 1 right, you had a head start: it was a lighthouse.
Many of you thought that the answer to Q2 - 'what was the DC comics character Shazam originally - and confusingly - known as?' - was the character's real name, Billy Batson. Which made sense - but didn't really pick up on the 'and confusingly' part of the question. The answer Mr Green was looking for was 'Captain Marvel', and an impressive 38 of you got this right. In Q3, Jules Verne's the Nautilus may have travelled 20,000 leagues under the sea, but that was travelling horizontally: the maximum depth it reached was actually only 4.
Q4 stumped most of you: the novel that won the first Arthur C Clarke award in 1987, even though its author didn't consider it to be science fiction, was The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (making her first of three appearances in this year's quiz).
Mr Green's final question was a sort of fantasy GeoGuessr, with the much-travelled James McAvoy popping in and out of various fictional universes.
A solid 45 of you knew that the third picture was an image from the TV adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune novels - not Blade Runner, Star Trek, Star Wars or Mad Max, tho they all feature desert locations.
Creative suggestions for the final image included Snowpiercer, The Thing (great to know there are some John Carpenter fans out there), Everest, Shackleton, and, er, Putin. But the correct answer was was Bolvangar, from the Northern Lights trilogy by Philip Pullman.
Round 3 - Mr Dormandy's gallery of photos from recent productions of Shakespeare's plays - proved challenging. Perhaps we can blame COVID for that: theatres have been mostly closed, on and off, for a while.
Picture 1 was from As You Like It: the character on the left is Rosalind, here disguised as a youth, Ganymede (hence the moustache). Viola was the most common alternative suggested here, but was both wrong, and premature (she'll be the right answer later on tho). The forest location is Shakespeare's forest of Arden (a fusion of the French Ardennes and the playwright's own Warwickshire roots). Not Sherwood Forest. Not by a country mile.
Your imaginations ran riot with Picture 2: Falstaff, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, Andrew Aguecheek, Dr Doolittle, Alexander Hamilton (was it the jacket???). But it's actually three characters from The Tempest: Stefano's the drunken butler, and under the sheet are the jester Trinculo and local islander Caliban. And 17 of you knew that.
The third one was tough, even by Shakespearean standards: it's from Two Gentlemen of Verona, and features Launce, and his dog, Crab. 9 of you got this right (which was impressive!). But most of you were lost for ideas: 'Family Guy/Brian?' someone suggested hopefully. Nope.
In Picture 4, the rather bemused looking lady under the table is Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing: not 'Banquo's ghost emerging at the banquet' or 'Mel from Bake-Off'.
Talking of Banquo, a mighty 116 of you recognised that the couple with blood on their hands here are of course the Macbeths, and that the blood belonged to Duncan. We were a bit concerned about the quizzer who suggested this might be 'Will and Kate'. More than a bit concerned, tbh.
Picture number 6 comes from A Midsummer Night's Dream's play-within-a-play, 'The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe', featuring Bottom the weaver in the male title role, as most of you knew - although no one was entirely sure why he has a tree on his head.
'Heisenberg from Breaking Bad' was a popular answer for Question 7 - and we'll admit it, there is a strong resemblance. But come on - look at the socks! They're cross-gartered, so it must be Malvolio from Twelfth Night. Only 15 of you knew this. And it's a GCSE set text. Shame on you!
The character on the left, looking like an uncooked prawn about to be skewered, was the ghost of Old Hamlet: alternative suggestions included Ariel, the Tin Man, 'Slenderman' and the Silver Surfer. 'Your typical alleyway', reflected one quizzer.
Most of you recognised the late, great Sir Anthony Sher in Q9, but in which Shakespearean role? And who's that giving him a hug? Quite a few correctly identified the character as Shakespeare's 'fat knight', Sir John Falstaff: and - logically enough - deduced that his lady friend must therefore be one of the Merry Wives of Windsor (Mistress Ford was a popular choice). Right character, wrong play: this is Henry IV Part I (or II), and the lady in red is Paola Dionisotti as Mistress Quickly. Only two people got this right. Hari Collins and Dr Ruddick - we salute you.
The final photo was a bit sneaky - the character is male, but being played here by Kathryn Hunter: it's King Lear. Not Hecate, or any of the witches from Macbeth. And not Groot either. Tho we can see why you suggested that.
Round 4 was Dr McDonnell and Dr Ruddick's fantasy fiction round, and it's now clear that you all know a lot more about fantasy fiction than you do about Shakespeare. The longest series by word count is The Wheel of Time (most people thought it was LOTR) but if you go by books, it's obviously the Disc World series by Terry Pratchett, finite at 41 since the author's too early death, but infinitely entertaining. 45 of you knew that.
The scar on Dumbledore's knee is a perfect map of the London underground, and Edmund sold out his siblings for a box of Turkish delight: more of you knew the second than the first. The question on Tolkien's rings should have been easy: you just needed a poem and some basic arithmetic skills. 'Three Rings for the Elven Lords under the Sky/Seven for the Dwarf Lords in their halls of Stone/Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die/One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne' ... 3 + 7 + 9 + 1 = 20. And even if you didn't know the poem, 'one ring to rule them ALL' is a gentle hint that there are actually quite a few.
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| (but twenty in total) |
Dr Ruddick's 'Find the series by the items' round also had many of you foxed: 'wardrobe/umbrella/ship' is clearly Narnia (enter through the wardrobe, meet Mr Tumnus with his umbrella and take off with Prince Caspian on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ...). At least two of you thought it was the world of Michael Bond's Paddington (without marmalade??? surely not!)
'Sugar bowl, fungus and orphans' caused some controversy: of course you knew this was Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events (that is, if you didn't think it was Oliver Twist or the BFG), but the key question was, is this a fantasy series? Some of you argued fiercely that it was (largely by dint of being so surreal): and some of you argued equally fiercely that it wasn't ('it's not fantasy, it's just very stylised, like a Wes Anderson film'; 'there are no elves').
'Coal, roses and parachutes' clearly signified The Hunger Games, although several connected these with another dystopia, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Finally, 'Balloon, knife and bears' represented the world of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Not 'A Day in the Life of a Canadian' as one fifth former quipped. Overall, the series with the highest recognition rate was Narnia, with 65 correct answers, and The Hunger Games had the least (only 9 of you identified it).
Round 5 - Mr Kemp's annual Famous Literature Features round - included (and created) a few furrowed brows ...
Gordon Ramsay was a rather more unexpected choice - but we can just about see that one too:
The bald pate and bristly eyebrows of picture number 2 belonged to ...
An impressive 26 of you correctly deduced that these immaculately coiffed curls hover over the little grey cells belonging to ....
the grande dame of crime herself: Agatha Christie. Not Betty Friedan, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Bronte or - and again, we can just about see this - Marilyn Monroe.
Spookily, 26 of you (not the same 26 of course) also knew that this lofty forehead and smooth side-parting belonged to ...
... a surprisingly jaunty looking Edgar Allan Poe. But at least one of you had no idea: '¯\_(ツ)_/¯'
The temples fetchingly bedecked with a laurel wreath didn't belong to Cicero, Herodotus, Petrarch, Leonardo da Vinci, 'Canterbury Tales guy', Julius Caesar or (perhaps inevitably) Erasmus. No, they belonged to ...
... Dante, not looking terribly happy about it either.
The bronzed brow and silver perm in photo number five drew a complete blank from most people. Malcolm Gladwell, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Michelle Obama and, er, Richard Dawkins were all suggested.
But it was Margaret Atwood, making her second appearance in this year's quiz. 'Mr Kemp, I don't like this section very much' lamented one quizzer.
Round 6 was much less stressful, and we're very grateful to Mr Perrin and the Modern Languages Dept for providing it. With a bit of help from your GCSE vocab lists, it was clear that pretty much all of you could work out that:
1. Pene d’amor perdute = Love's Labour's Lost
2. Sogno di una notte di mezza estate = A Midsummer Night's Dream
3. Viel Lärm um Nichts = Much Ado About Nothing
4. Der Kaufmann von Venedig = The Merchant of Venice
5. Maß für Maß = Measure for Measure
6. La mégère apprivoisée = The Taming of the Shrew
7. La Nuit des rois = Twelfth Night
8. Comme il vous plaira = As You Like It
9. Cuento de invierno = A Winter's Tale
10. A buen fin no hay mal principio = All's Well That Ends Well
And end well this round definitely did, with the most consistently successful scores of all the rounds across the whole quiz. Trickiest were numbers 1, 6, and 7 - 1 we suspect because it's not terribly well known or much staged, in English or Italian; 6 perhaps because 'la mégère' doesn't make it on to many vocabulary lists, not even at A Level; and 7 because just not enough of us celebrate epiphany with a Galette des Rois - magnifique!
After Round 6, many of you were starting to rack up the points, and the one in four chance Dr Cocks gave you with his multiple choice 'Spot the Victorian Novel from the Plot Summary' round also helped you make up for earlier memory lapses.
The novel by Thomas Hardy which features a young working class woman who is seduced by a member of the gentry whose child she secretly bears and names Sorrow is Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and 48.5% of you knew that. The novel featuring a miserly weaver whose life is transformed when he adopts a small orphaned child called Eppie is George Eliot's Silas Marner (21.5%). The story of a drunken hay-trusser who sells his wife and baby daughter to a sailor for 5 guineas is The Mayor of Casterbridge (21.1%: Thomas Hardy again). And the novel of the Sensation genre featuring the story of a woman who fakes her own death, commits bigamy and pushes her husband down a well is of course Lady Audley's Secret (35.1%).
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| Lady Audley pushing her husband down a well - as you do - so that no one will discover her secret |
The novel by Charles Dickens that has as its eponymous character the intellectually disabled son of a murderer, arrested as a leader of a mob of anti-Catholic rioters and subsequently jailed and sentenced to death is Barnaby Rudge (33.3%). The novel which features an eponymous character who dreams of being a student in the fictional university town of Christminster is Jude the Obscure (Hardy no. 3, and 21.2% of you recognised it). The sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that describes Alice's further adventures as she moves through a mirror into another unreal world of illogical behaviour dominated by chess is Through the Looking-Glass (we're very happy that 75% of you know this one). And the novel by one of the Brontes which relates the abusive marriage between Arthur Huntingdon and the novel’s protagonist, the artist Helen Graham and her subsequent flight from the marriage is The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (30.4%).
Leaving Mr Gardner's cryptic crossword until almost the end was perhaps a little mean. 'My tutor group have gone and I am too tired to complete this on my own', wrote Dr Ruddick plaintively. We sympathise! But cryptic crossword clues are always crackable in the end - you just have to decode them.
To start off, you have to work out which bit of the clue is the 'definer': it's usually the first or last phrase, although sometimes it can be the whole clue. For instance, in 2 (across): 'Elizabethan crossdresser is instrumental protagonist! (5)', the definer was 'Elizabethan cross-dresser', and 'protagonist' also gave you a hint: the clue was 'instrumental'. So the answer you were looking for - the five letter name of a leading character in an Elizabethan play who cross-dresses and whose name is somehow linked to an instrument - was Viola, from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (see? we told you she'd be back).
In the clue for 4 (across), Mr Gardner cunningly distracted you from the definer by disguising it as an announcement: “Ladies and Gentlemen: the enigmatic T. S. Eliot!” (7)'. But take 'Ladies' and 'Gentlemen' out of that context, and imagine them as signs on a door or in the street, and you've got your definer.
In 6 (across) - 'Shakespeare’s refused entry, I hear? (4)' - the phrase 'I hear?' tells you that the answer is a pun. Shakespeare is the definer: 'refused entry' is the clue. So you're looking for a word that means 'refused entry' but also sounds the same as a word for Shakespeare. The answer is 'bard' (barred - in true Peggy Mitchell fashion).
9,5 (across) - 'Deranged Joe butchered us for Victorian novel (4,3,7)' - is another anagram: you know this because 'deranged' tells you it's going to feature disordered letters. The definer - since it's a literary quiz - is likely to be 'Victorian novel', which leaves you to rearrange the letters in 'Joe butchered us' until you get the right book: Jude the Obscure (fresh from a starring appearance in Dr Cocks's round).
10 (across) - 'Predator pens lament for Bloomsbury author (5)' - hid another familiar name from this year's quiz. The definer is 'Bloomsbury author' - and the clue unlocks as follows: 'predator' = wolf; 'pens lament' tells you that the word wolf 'pens' (traps) within it the cry - 'O!' - you make when you lament something (like how difficult cryptic crossword clues are). 'Wolf' with an 'o' trapped in the middle gives you a Bloomsbury novelist - Virginia Woolf (joint top with Margaret Atwood for most appearances in this year's quiz).
12 (across) - 'Australia XI drop one novelist (6)' - is pretty straightforward: 'novelist' is the definer, 'XI drop one' is 'ten', and if you abbreviate Australia, you get 'Aus'. 'Aus-ten'. Simples!
13 (across) - 'Nineteenth-century heroine’s eye blurred after first month—starts to reassess employment (4,4)' - is a bit more complex. Your definer is at the start, so you're looking for the name of a 'nineteenth-century heroine'. But how do you find it? The clue tells you to put 'eye blurred' after 'first month': the first month is January, so that's 'Jan' followed by eye 'blurred', which means doubled (as in double-vision). So now you've got 'Jan', followed by 'eeye': and to finish it off, you need 'starts to reassess employment'. The 'starts' (ie the first letters) to the words 'reassess' and 'employment' are 'r' and 'e'. Put it all together and you've got: Jan + eeye + re = Jane Eyre. Complicated. But logical.
After 13, 1 (down) was a simple pun: 'A speedy satirist? (5)' - easy: it's the author of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift.
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| Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, adapted into a graphic novel by the brilliant Martin Rowson |
To solve 8, 3 (down) - 'Talent washed away for a modernist masterpiece? (3,5,4)' - you need to pick up that 'away', like 'deranged' and 'enigmatic', means it's another anagram. Scrambling the letters of 'Talent washed' should give you the title of a modernist masterpiece: and indeed it does - The Waste Land.
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| Another extraordinary adaptation by Martin Rowson |
The final clue 11, 7 (down) - 'Assessment before an award for Roman rabble-rouser (4,6)' - unravels as follows. 'Roman rabble-rouser' is the definer: so you need a word for 'assessment' (mark) followed by 'an', followed by a word for an award (Tony - the theatrical equivalent of an Oscar). Put them together and what do you get? Mark Antony.
So - how good were you at crosswords? Pretty good, as it turned out, with almost 50% of you getting the right answer for each of these clues. And if you're interested in finding out more about cryptic clues, Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose by Sandy Balfour is well worth reading.
It was International Women's Week, so we gave the last word to Mrs Cummings's round of ten final lines from ten eminent women authors. Or at least we thought they were eminent: now we're not so sure ...
We thought the names in Q3 would make it too easy: 'With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.' Darcy? Elizabeth? It's got to be Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. But only 25 of you recognised it - which surprised us - although not quite as much as one lost soul's suggestion that this might be the final line of Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic dystopia The Road. We suspect that suggestion wasn't entirely serious.
Q4 was much easier: almost everyone knew that 'The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well.' brought J K Rowling's Harry Potter novels to an end. Q5 featured the fabulous last line of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as the monster retreats across the ice floes of the Arctic: 'He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.' Extraordinary stuff - correctly identified by a mere 15 of you, with Moby Dick, Life of Pi and The Waves as popular second guesses.
Only a few of you recognised Q6 as 'one of the Veronica Roth ones', which it was indeed: 'But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other.” is the final line of Allegiant, the last book in the Divergent Trilogy. The Hunger Games was a popular as an alternative - popular, but still wrong. 'She was a very forgetful cat.' was of course the last line of Mog the Forgetful Cat by the late, great, local legend Judith Kerr: and (unlike Mog) most of you remembered that.
Again, we thought the name in Q7 was a bit of a giveaway: 'Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.' is, of course, the last line of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, as 23 of you knew, although Susan Hill's The Woman in Black was for many quizzers a plausible alternative. In the penultimate question,‘The mouse found a nut and the nut was good.’ - and so were most of you, with almost 75% recognising the ending of The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson.
The last question in the final lines round - we had to finish on this one - saw the third and final appearance of Booker Prize-winning Margaret Atwood. "Are there any questions?" is of course the closing line of The Handmaid's Tale. Some clever suggestions here: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 'My Teachers', 'Yes, like what is this one' and a solitary but inevitable 'nah' - but in the end, at least 7 of you got it right.
So - those are the answers: our thanks again to Mr Harris, Mr Green, Mr Dormandy, Dr McDonnell, Dr Ruddick, Mr Kemp, Mr Perrin and the Modern Languages Department, Dr Cocks, Mr Gardner and Mrs Cummings for so generously providing the questions. The absolute final question we need to answer, of course, is who is this year's winner? Drum roll ...
We're delighted to announce that - in another victory for nominative determinism - this year's winner is Max SWINNERton - well done, Max!!!!! We'd also like to commend the fifth form, for some witty and inventive stabs in the dark, and Dr Ruddick, for persevering in the face of fatigue. We hope you all had fun taking part - have a great Easter, and see you next term!
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